Sox Live to Fight Another Day

In the do-or-die world of baseball in (nearly) October, the Chicago White Sox won their makeup game with Detroit on Monday, but the teams once again had to compete with the weather.

The game, as Rick Telander writes in the Chicago Sun-Times, had been postponed by rain several times since its original Aug. 12 playing date.

This time, though, the teams finally played the game, and the White Sox won, creating a tie atop the A.L. Central — and forcing tonight's one-game playoff between the White Sox and the Minnesota Twins.

During the season, each team was dominant against the other when playing at home so, in spite of the fact that Minnesota swept Chicago in a three-game series in Minneapolis last week, I predict the White Sox will beat the Twins tonight in Chicago.

As they say, there's nothing like home cookin'.

The winner will play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the divisional series that begins Thursday. The winner of that series will play the Los Angeles Angels-Boston Red Sox winner in the A.L. Championship series.

Almost Set Now

Sunday was the last day on the major league baseball schedule, and the initial pairings in the playoffs are almost set now.

It's a done deal in the National League.

The Los Angeles Dodgers will play the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field in the opener of their series on Wednesday. Milwaukee and Philadelphia will open their series that afternoon in Philadelphia.

Likewise, the American League's playoff schedule is almost complete now.

Today, the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers have to play a makeup game. If Chicago wins, the White Sox will be tied for the A.L. Central title and will play host to the Minnesota Twins in a one-game playoff tomorrow. If Chicago loses today, the Twins win the division and the final playoff berth.

The winner of the A.L. Central will travel to A.L. East champion Tampa Bay for the series opener on Thursday. Meanwhile, the other A.L. playoff series begins Wednesday when the Boston Red Sox travel to Los Angeles to take on the Angels.

Favre's Excellent Adventure

Just when it seems I'm reconciled to proclaiming Brett Favre's NFL career complete, he steps up and does something he's never done before.

I refer, of course, to Favre's six touchdown passes for the New York Jets against Arizona on Sunday.

In his storied career as the record-shattering quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Favre never threw six TD passes in a game.

That was something I already knew. When Favre joined the Packers in the early 1990s, I had already been a Packer fan for a quarter of a century (I was converted at a young age after watching the Packers and Vince Lombardi on TV), so I've been following his Hall of Fame career for a long time.

And his six TD passes on Sunday carved a brand-new entry in his biography.

"Favre Hasn't Lost the Magic Touch," shouts the headline on Steve Serby's column about Favre in the New York Post.

But this was "magic" that took football fans to an entirely new level of prestidigitation.

In the locker room, Serby says, Jerricho Cotchery, who caught two of the TD passes, asked Favre if he had matched his career best. Favre told him he had never thrown six TD passes in a game.

"'That,' Cotchery was saying now, 'was the end of the conversation,'" Serby writes, "'cause I'm scratching my head like, 'Really? He's never thrown six touchdowns before!' But, he played great today. He was just dialing it up, telling everyone, 'Get ready, the ball is coming.'"

And, as Favre has shown in other record-setting performances — like his almost mythical Monday night performance against the Oakland Raiders the day after his father's death in December 2003 — when "the ball is coming," you'd better be prepared.

Just think. There was a time in the days before the game when it was believed that Favre wouldn't be able to play on Sunday.

"Imagine if it gets closer to perfect," Serby writes. "Imagine when Favre, whose interception came on what he thought was a free play, has two healthy ankles, if Favre and the offensive braintrust, if Favre and his receivers, grow their newfound chemistry."

Even with New England's Tom Brady out for the season, it's still a longshot that the Jets will make it to the playoffs. As brilliantly as he played on Sunday, Favre still will turn 39 in less than two weeks.

Time is not on his side.

But, today, Jets fans are imagining things they haven't imagined in a long time, thanks to Brett Favre.

Who Should Be the New #1?

On Thursday night, when Oregon State knocked off the top-ranked college football team in the land (Southern Cal), it became official that a new #1 team would emerge following the release of the next football polls.

Shortly, those polls will be released. But, since USC's loss, we've also seen third-ranked Georgia lose to eighth-ranked Alabama and fourth-ranked Florida lose to unranked Ole Miss.

So three of the top five teams went down to defeat within a couple of days of each other — including two teams (USC and Florida) who lost to unranked teams.

Does that mean that second-ranked Oklahoma should ascend to the top spot, following the Sooners' triumph over #24 TCU?

Should fifth-ranked (and defending national champion) LSU leap to the top spot after defeating unranked Mississippi State by 10 points at home?

Or should Texas move up to #1, after whipping my alma mater, Arkansas, 52-10, in spite of the fact that this is clearly a rebuilding year for the Razorbacks?

If you're a college football fan, there was a lot going on Saturday. SI.com's Stewart Mandel said it was a "virtual potpourri of badly played football," but, from a viewer's perspective, it's hard to beat a day in which so many ranked teams lose to so many unranked ones. In addition to USC's and Florida's stunning losses, #9 Wisconsin lost to unranked Michigan, unranked Navy defeated #16 Wake Forest, unranked Maryland upset #20 Clemson and unranked Houston humiliated #23 East Carolina.

No doubt many schools will have cases to make for being recognized as the top team in the country. And the new rankings probably will provoke many arguments.

But, honestly, does the ranking really matter in September?

For some schools, yes, it does.

Those are the schools that haven't been on football's national championship radar frequently (if at all) — including unbeaten Missouri, which had the day off yesterday.

Programs that have built reputations as football powers don't really need to be ranked #1 at this stage of the season.

But someone's going to be #1 when the votes are tabulated.

And my choice is Alabama. The final score in the Crimson Tide's 41-30 victory over #3 Georgia was misleadingly close — Alabama was ahead, 31-0, by halftime and "toyed" with the Bulldogs the rest of the way, reports the Kansas City Star.

Next up for Alabama is a home game against 4-0 Kentucky at 2:30 p.m. (Central) on Saturday. CBS plans to televise it. The sight of 90,000 delirious Tide fans in Bryant-Denny Stadium should make for compelling television.

Don't look now, but the Tide fans have a lot to be excited about. Alabama is 5-0 and has put up 90 points against two SEC opponents thus far.

Even so, coach Lou Saban, who has restored the Tide to its powerhouse status, isn't buying the talk that Alabama is a contender for the national title.

"After five games?" he asked after Saturday night's win in Athens, Ga. "Let's see when we get a full body of work at the end of the season."

Seems like the kind of thing Paul "Bear" Bryant would have said.

Is USC One and Done?

I stayed up late enough on Thursday night to watch Oregon State hold off Southern Cal's comeback attempt, and the then-No. 1 Trojans lost the decision to the upstart Beavers, 27-21.

And, because of that loss in late September, many people are now writing off USC's prospects for playing for a national title in January.

For example, Michael Ventre writes, for NBCSports.com, that the Trojans can forget about appearing in the national title game in January.

"The Trojans didn’t just hurt their chances to play for a national title," Ventre says, "they slaughtered them."

Ventre doesn't refer to the mere fact that Oregon State was unranked. In fact, according to SportsIllustrated.com, the Beavers barely rank in the top half of the entire Division I.

He contends that the real problem is that the Trojans "should have learned this lesson already" when they lost at home to Stanford, 24-23, nearly a year ago, "and that’s why voters will punish them from here on."

Thus, in Ventre's analysis, those who vote in the poll rankings have such long memories and extensive knowledge of college football that they will remember not only that USC lost to Stanford last October but also that they will recall the role they played in gradually improving USC's chances of playing for the national championship by continuing to rank them higher with each succeeding victory — and they will seek absolution for their complicity.

"People are savvier these days," Ventre writes, "and they’re more likely to sip the Kool-Aid rather than guzzle it without thinking."

In Ventre's words, last year the Trojans "finished strong and made an inspired case for why they should play for the national championship."

But, in the end, even though the Trojans were in the running for a berth in the national title game, they didn't get it.

Ventre suggests that the voters won't let USC get away with another upset loss in 2008 and be a prospect for the national championship by season's end. I think he gives the voters more credit than they deserve.

Personally, I'm not convinced that USC won't be in the national title picture again at the end of the season — assuming they run the table the rest of the way.

And, as weak as the Pac-10 is, it seems likely to me that USC can win the rest of its games.

It seems to me that the team that has been living on borrowed time is Ohio State.

The Buckeyes played SEC teams for the national title the last two years and failed miserably each time.

USC's loss on Thursday night should weigh even more heavily on the Buckeyes than on the Trojans. It was merely two weeks ago that Ohio State was hammered in a face-to-face meeting with the same USC team that was embarrassed by Oregon State.

So it seems to me that the real question should be, will the pollsters promote Ohio State (currently languishing in the Second Ten of both Top 25 polls) and eventually give the Buckeyes a third straight opportunity to seize the ring — in spite of lurching through the season?

Lord knows, I'm no fan of the BCS. But there's a good reason why the BCS rankings are not released until after the midway point of the season. It gives teams time to show their true identities.

Are they contenders or pretenders? That's a question that simply cannot be adequately answered in three or four games.

And, with all due respect to Ventre, the BCS pollsters haven't demonstrated to me that their memories are longer than the typical gypsy moth's.

A Blast From The Past

A couple of weeks ago, Hurricane Ike rearranged my football-viewing plans.

Of course, the fact is that the hurricane rearranged quite a few lives, and its effect on me was minimal.

Nevertheless, I had intended, on Sept. 13, to watch my alma mater, the University of Arkansas, play the University of Texas in a football game.

The hurricane forced the schools to postpone the game. It was re-scheduled for this Saturday. And, as I understand it, ABC will televise the game at 2:30 p.m. (Central).

If you didn't grow up in Arkansas, you have no idea what the Arkansas-Texas rivalry meant in the days when both schools were members of the old Southwest Conference and faced each other in every sport.

For that matter, as Wally Hall observes at WholeHogSports.com, "[T]here is now an entire generation of people who were born and raised in Arkansas who don’t hate the Texas Longhorns."

That astonishes me.

As Hall writes, "Until the time Arkansas left for the SEC, the majority of the Razorbacks nation circled the Texas game as soon as the schedules were printed. Now, an entire generation has been deprived of the pure joy of hating the Longhorns, whose fan base generally bordered on arrogant."

When I was a little boy, the Razorbacks won a share of the mythical national championship in football in 1964. They shared the title with Alabama (coached by the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant), but they wouldn't have been in the position to share the national title at all if Ken Hatfield hadn't returned a punt for a touchdown against Texas.

Arkansas won, 14-13, and went on to beat Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl (back in the days when winning the Cotton Bowl really meant something).

Five years later, for college football's centennial season, ABC persuaded Arkansas and Texas to move their game from its normal schedule date in mid-October to the first weekend in December — when no one else was playing and the eyes of the nation would be focused on that game alone.

In hindsight, it seems preordained that the game — dubbed the "Game of the Century" at the time — would feature the #1- and #2-ranked teams in the nation — and, indeed, ABC made the offer to the schools anticipating that they would be the top two teams in the country when they met.

But only two weeks before the "Great Shootout," as the game also was known, Ohio State was the top-ranked team in the nation. When the Buckeyes lost to their rival, Michigan, it secured the #1 vs. #2 matchup between Texas and Arkansas that ABC had been hoping for.

President Nixon attended the game — the only time a sitting president came to a football game in Fayetteville — and gave the Longhorns a plaque naming them the national champions after they prevailed, 15-14. Future President George H.W. Bush (at the time, a Republican congressman from Texas) also attended the game, along with many political figures from both states.

I guess ABC wanted to catch some more lightning in a bottle the next year because, once again, the Arkansas-Texas game was moved to the first weekend in December.

But, whereas the 1969 game was a dramatic, sitting-on-the-edge-of-your-seat experience for football fans, the 1970 game in Austin was a lopsided affair.

I was 11 years old at the time, and my most vivid memory from watching that game on TV was from the first half. Texas had already scored, and Arkansas had the ball near the Texas goal line. The Razorbacks made four attempts to score and failed on each attempt, turning the ball over on downs.

I recall one of the adults who had been watching the game with us standing up and observing that, if Arkansas couldn't score in four opportunities inside the 10-yard line, it was going to be a long afternoon. Indeed, it was. Texas won the game, 42-7, but failed to repeat as national champion.

For most of the next 10 years, Arkansas and Texas played their game in mid-October, as they had been doing for decades, although the schools were persuaded to move the game to December again in 1976, a year after Arkansas, Texas and Texas A&M shared the SWC championship.

But 1976 proved to be a down year for both schools, and the only real significance of the game was the fact that it turned out to be the last in which Darrell Royal coached Texas and Frank Broyles coached Arkansas.

The networks persuaded the schools to move their game again for the 1980 season — although, this time, it was moved up on the calendar instead of down. The schools agreed to play each other on Labor Day — September 1.

It was Texas' turn to host so the game was played in Austin.

It's always hot in Texas at the end of August. But, if you're old enough to remember the summer of 1980, you know that it was a particularly brutal one. In Texas, which typically sees temperatures in the mid- to upper 90s in the summer, temperatures were well over 100 degrees for about six or seven weeks.

And, although temperatures had cooled off slightly by September 1, it was still an unbelievably hot atmosphere in which to play a football game — especially one as intense as the Arkansas-Texas game. While the game was played at night, the sun didn't go down until halftime and the temperatures never really cooled down. Some players on both sides appeared to be on the verge of giving in to heat exhaustion.

Texas won, 23-17, and Arkansas limped through the rest of the season.

I will never forget the game that was played the next season. I was a senior at Arkansas, and I went to the Arkansas-Texas game for the first time in my life. It was played in Fayetteville in mid-October.

I almost didn't attend that game. A couple of weeks earlier, Arkansas had lost to TCU for the first time in my lifetime. Texas, meanwhile, was ranked #1, and everyone thought Texas was going to administer a severe beating when the Longhorns came to town.

I had my ticket (purchased before the season started at the student discount rate), but I hadn't decided to go the morning of the game. At the last minute, I decided to go. I'm glad I did. Lou Holtz led the Razorbacks to an astonishing 42-11 victory that is still talked about among long-time Razorback fans 27 years later.

Even Hall mentions it in his pregame column.

And he points out that "Since Arkansas joined the SEC, no opponent has come close to creating the same burning desire" the rivalry with Texas did.

Not LSU. Not Alabama. Not even Ole Miss, which was something of a non-conference rival for a long time — and may become even more of a rival now that former Arkansas coach Houston Nutt is the Rebels' coach.

I don't know if Saturday's game will recapture the old feeling. And, if it's a blowout, I may abandon it early.

But I'll be watching.

My Top 10 Baseball Movies

As I was writing last week on my Freedom Writing blog about the homestretch of the baseball season, it occurred to me that the American Film Institute has never compiled a list of the top 100 sports movies.

The closest, I believe, that AFI has come was its Top Heroes and Villains list from 2003, and its Top 100 Cheers list from three years later.

But the only entries on the Heroes and Villains list were Sylvester Stallone in the title role in the original "Rocky" and Gary Cooper’s portrayal of Lou Gehrig in "The Pride of the Yankees." Both characters were heroes, obviously.

The Top Cheers list includes several sports films — "Rocky," "Breaking Away" (which may push the point, since it’s about cycling — although the Tour de France fans will insist that it counts), "Hoosiers," "The Pride of the Yankees," "National Velvet" (which, again, may push the point), "Field of Dreams," "Seabiscuit," "Rudy," "The Karate Kid" (once again, it probably pushes the point) and "Chariots of Fire."

I suppose you could include "Searching for Bobby Fischer" as a sports movie, if you want to categorize chess as a sport.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it and, in honor of baseball’s nearly completed season (and its nearly final roster of playoff entries), I’ve compiled my personal Top 10 Baseball Movie list.

(Speaking of real life and baseball, the Dodgers are now one win or one Arizona loss away from clinching the N.L. West, and the Brewers and Mets are deadlocked in a race for the N.L.'s wild card. Meanwhile, the Cubs have clinched the Central and the Phillies appear to be taking charge in the N.L. East.

(In the American League, the Los Angeles Angels have clinched their division, and Tampa Bay and Boston are in the playoffs but it remains to be seen which team will be the division winner and which will be the wild card team.

(In the A.L. Central, Minnesota has won two straight games over Chicago at home and trails the White Sox by half a game with four to play, including one final game between the two teams tonight.)

If I had the resources AFI has, I suppose I could compile a Top 100 list, but a Top 10 list is good enough for me.

By the way, such a list does not necessarily imply that the film is inspirational, merely that baseball is, if not the focus of the story, the subtext for the tale.

1. "Eight Men Out," from 1988, the true story of the Chicago White Sox and the "Black Sox Scandal" of 1919. Personally, I felt it was a remarkable film, rich in period detail. It's the baseball movie I never tire of seeing. It combines my interests in sports and history beautifully.
   
   As a matter of fact, while the film is a story about men who play baseball, it isn't really a baseball movie, in the same way that other films on this list are. I've always felt that "Eight Men Out" was more about human nature, avarice and pride — and it's a great example of how a film can use a sport as the backdrop for relating a bigger story.
   
   If the story happens to be true, as this one does, that makes it more effective.


2. "Pride of the Yankees," from 1942, starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright and Walter Brennan. Like "Eight Men Out," it’s a powerful story, made all the more powerful because it is true. And it includes Cooper's memorable line, delivered to a packed Yankee Stadium: "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."


3. "Bull Durham," a fictional story, released in 1988, starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. A delightful love story set in the minor leagues.


4. "A League of Their Own," from 1992, the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Directed by Penny Marshall and starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna, Lori Petty and Rosie O’Donnell, the film has one of my favorite lines ("There’s no crying in baseball!").


5. "Field of Dreams," from 1989, starring Costner and, in his final film appearance, Burt Lancaster. Lancaster’s character, "Moonlight" Graham, was a real person, although the film takes a few liberties with his life story. And the film also includes a line that has been quoted and misquoted in hundreds of settings ("If you build it, he will come.").


6. "The Natural," from 1984, starring Robert Redford. An entertaining fictional story about a baseball prodigy that has its slow moments, but it is ultimately a rewarding tale originally written by Bernard Malamud.


7. "61*," from 2001, the story of the 1961 season, when Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. It was lovingly directed by Yankee fan Billy Crystal and featured a cast of unknowns.


8. "Fear Strikes Out," the 1957 true story of Jimmy Piersall’s battle with bipolar disorder. The film starred Anthony Perkins in the title role. (Piersall is still alive, by the way. He’ll be 79 in November.)


9. "Bang the Drum Slowly," from 1973, was baseball’s version of "Brian’s Song" — although "Brian’s Song" had the virtue of being a true story. "Bang the Drum Slowly" was fictional and a guaranteed tear-jerker starring a young Robert De Niro (before his breakthrough performances in "The Godfather Part II," "Taxi Driver," "The Deer Hunter" and "Raging Bull").


10. "The Bad News Bears," from 1976, starring Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal. I was a teenager when the film was released. My grandmother apparently wanted a bonding experience with my brother and me so she took us to see the film when it was released.
    
    The film was entertaining for both adults and children. I remember it was controversial because of the language used by the children in the film. Particularly memorable was a line by one of the youngsters, who dismissed his teammates as "a bunch of Jews, spics, niggers, pansies and a booger-eating moron."
    
    I never saw the Billy Bob Thornton remake that was released a few years ago so I don't know if that line was in the script 30 years after the original was released. But if it was, I doubt that it raised many eyebrows — except, perhaps, in the politically correct crowd.